In 1998, electronic component manufacturers discontinued 34,000 parts. In years 2001 and 2002, that number rose to 55,000 and 120,000 parts respectively according to PCNalert, a company that tracks supply base end-of-life notices. With recent market trends this rapidly growing rate may decline; however, the average yearly EOL level is expected to remain markedly high.
Companies that maintain large product portfolios, for example, can utilize over 25,000 semiconductor, passive, and magnetic components, which can be sourced by more than 300 manufacturers. Many of these products consist of 10-20 different suppliers providing some 20 to 50 different electronic components. Also, a majority of these products have a minimum life of 10 years, with many customers keeping them in service for decades, especially within the industrial, automotive, telecommunications, and military market sectors. Further, a sampling of 23,000 components utilized by some 10,000 products lead to the determination that approximately 54% of such components were beyond their mature phase of life, with some 34% declining in use, or identified for phase out. Moreover, a survey of Fortune 500 companies, conducted by CSM Strategies, reported that users of these types of components experienced, on average, a 3% per year rate of EOL for their active bill of materials (BOM)—this places a significant percentage of components at risk to EOL.
An aggregation of the aforementioned factors, present a problem of not “if”, but “when” will a given product be affected by end-of-life events. Conventional mitigation of an EOL occurrence does nothing to anticipate or elevate within a near horizon, the probable occurrences of the next event on the same product. Consequently, product changes driven by these events are typically disjoint, which places an increasing burden on already constrained development and continuation engineering resources. Such demand leads to accelerated inventory costs due to bridge buys needed to maintain product shipments until resources can be implemented. This ultimately results in decreased revenue, increased risk to new product development, and customer dissatisfaction.
The burden on constrained development and continuation engineering resources can be further mitigated with the subject invention through use of viability assessment tools used in conjunction with planning and prioritization tools. Since the impact of components at risk to EOL requires strategic considerations during planning processes and project prioritization the use of viability assessment and analysis can facilitate the planning and prioritization stages during a product life cycle. Viability assessment has been defined in an IEEE transaction paper as the measure of the Producibility, Supportability, and Evolvability of a product. The underlying premise of viability assessment is that the economic well-being of a company is inextricably linked to the sustainability of products. Currently there is no connection between viability assessment and obsolescence risk and no way to measure the viability of a product. Companies today are forced to chose between various projects that are competing for resource bandwidth and funding, and require a consistent set of and methodology for determining viability factors to be considered during planning processes and to assist with project prioritization. Therefore, to improve viability, planning must be conducted on a proactive basis to increase productivity and efficiency as a metric to assist in viability product management.